$4m · Seed · AI · London, UK
London-based Cori Clinical has raised a $4m Seed round to expand its AI workspace for designing and preparing clinical trials. Breega led the financing, with Enzo, Heartfelt, Together Ventures and Bynd participating. The company says the capital will expand delivery capacity, grow its clinical, engineering and commercial teams, and deepen the regulatory and clinical intelligence in the platform.
Cori brings an organisation's previous trial knowledge together with trial registries, regulatory guidance and public sources from agencies including the FDA, MHRA and EMA. It turns an initial brief into a connected protocol, submission package and operational plan. The company says it already works with two of the world's five largest enterprise clinical research organisations and has supported two neurosurgery and neuro-oncology trials at Erasmus MC.
A living trial model targets expensive rework
Clinical-trial protocols connect scientific questions to eligibility rules, endpoints, schedules, budgets and site operations. When those decisions are distributed across separate documents, one change can create inconsistent versions and downstream rework. Tufts CSDD research covering 950 protocols found that 76% had at least one amendment, while an earlier Tufts benchmark put the median direct cost of a substantial amendment at $141,000 for Phase II and $535,000 for Phase III trials.
Cori's commercial mechanism is to make the trial design a structured, versioned source of truth. Its sponsor product maps a change across the protocol, consent form, budget, analysis plan and submission pack, while keeping evidence and review history attached to each decision. If that structure prevents avoidable contradictions before submission, customers can save more than authoring time: they can reduce review cycles and protect the timetable to first participant.
The company reports an internal benchmark in which its AI reviewer flagged 82% of protocol errors classified as avoidable, and estimates that its approach could reduce average trial set-up costs by at least 33%. Those are company-modelled results rather than independently validated customer outcomes. The Seed round therefore funds a practical test of whether Cori can reproduce those gains across more sponsors, CROs, therapeutic areas and regulatory settings.
Trust has to scale with the workflow
A protocol platform sits close to decisions that affect patient eligibility, regulatory submissions and trial execution, so automation cannot be judged only by document speed. Cori says every value can be traced to its source, customer procedures can be used as review rules, and clinical teams retain responsibility for judgement and approval. Its own product philosophy explicitly argues for partial autonomy rather than replacing expert review.
That design choice is also a sales requirement. Large CROs and pharmaceutical companies need software that fits controlled processes, preserves auditability and can absorb updated guidance without silently rewriting prior decisions. The opportunity is to become the shared planning layer between medical, regulatory and operational teams. The execution risk is that each organisation brings different templates, procedures and data environments, so Cori must make implementation repeatable without flattening the expert judgement its product is meant to support.
